


a difficult goodbye (to all the things we hide)

by Lilaciliraya



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Temporary Character Death, Episode: s02e11 Sex Birth Death, Episode: s05e20 A Thousand Words, Episode: s06e16 Coda, Gen, He gets some tats instead, Its Spencers POV, Light Angst, POV Second Person, Reid doesn't do any drugs, Spencer has tattoos, Tattoos, The whole Emily thing ya know, all of these tags are useless i apologize, bc thats what i do i guess, but second person, that's all i remember about it, thats it, yay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 05:30:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12720585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilaciliraya/pseuds/Lilaciliraya
Summary: You’ll do whatever it takes to stay away from the dilaudid that calls you, that screams of forgetting. You don't need it anymore because you've discovered another way to forget, a place where nothing exists but the drag and the pull and the pressure and the permanence.(the one in which spencer has tattoos)





	a difficult goodbye (to all the things we hide)

**Author's Note:**

> title from heatstroke by brick and mortar- it has nothing to do with this i just like the song.  
> this is another quick thing i wrote for my whole 1000 words a day project...  
> and i kind of liked it so  
> here ya go.  
> it was definitely inspired by another story with tattoos- wait... what? by blythechild i believe  
> if you haven't read it it is very good  
> and you should.  
> anyways- here ya go! read on.

It takes a few tries. The first time, you can’t get it out of your head and you walk and walk and try to convince yourself that it’ll be okay. But in the end the voices screaming anxiety into your head make you turn and run away away away. It takes a few tries. The first one doesn’t go so well.

The second time, you take three very confident, determined, purposeful steps toward the door, swallowing down your fears before you realize that the back of your tongue is like sandpaper against your throat. You take one more determined step, this time in the opposite direction, and then you continue to step away. The second time doesn’t work out either. You’ll get there eventually.

The third time you need it. The third time is the night you enter your apartment for the first time since Hankel. Since you looked Tobias in the eyes and watched him die by your hand. You stare at your own front door for ten minutes before you realize that you need that other one, the one you’ve been too scared to enter. So fifteen minutes later finds you in front of that door, the glass one with the neon open sign and the words “Ray’s Tattoo” staring you down. This time you make it inside because you have no other choice and before you know it you are laying on a table and feeling this pressure and release and breathing, for what feels like the first time since the corn field.

You realize after that that you don’t need those other needles like you thought you would. You go home with your bandaged skin and your rapidly beating heart and you flush the contents of those glass vials down the toilet. You don’t need to prove anything to yourself, you just need to stop. And you always used to think that without temptation you couldn’t be good, that it didn’t really count unless the pull was there and you could resist it.

But now you think that the only thing that matters is that you don’t let this ruin you. And you’ll do whatever it takes to stay away from the dilaudid that calls you, that screams of forgetting. You can flush it because you just had a moment- or a long string of them, there, on that table- where you discovered another way to forget. Where nothing existed but the drag and the pull and the pressure and the permanence.

On that table everything you felt inside you became real. And then it felt lighter, somehow. Once it was sitting stark and black and visible on your own skin. It felt like you could carry it because it wasn’t sitting alone inside of you anymore. It was only your first tattoo but you know it won’t be your last.

 

\---

 

Everyone is watching you- at work, that is. It’s like they’re waiting for something. They are waiting for you to betray your own secrets and spill what’s wrong; they don’t believe that you can handle this on your own. That’s okay. You’ll just have to prove it. You’ve got time now- you aren’t acting this time, so you don’t have any pain building up inside of you just waiting for you to explode. They can watch and you’ll give nothing away because there isn’t anything to hide anymore.

Except for the ink. You don’t really want anyone to know about that.

You’re sneaking off to the bathroom during the work day for aftercare, and you know that they think you are shooting up. You take an abnormally long time in there because you have a hard time reaching your left shoulder blade to coat the fresh tattoo in a thin layer of oil. Soon you’ll be done with that, though. And they won’t ever find proof of drug use because there isn’t any.

\---

Eventually they realize that you aren’t going to break down. They come to terms with the fact that you’re still doing your job and you’re doing it well, that you either have it covered or you aren’t going to let anyone know otherwise. Maybe they just figure you went to someone else for help, each member thinking another was consulted without their knowledge. Whatever happens, the staring stops. You’re glad, because that means you can finally go get another tattoo without them noticing.

You get your second tattoo for Nathan Harris. It’s the one you wanted the second time you approached the tattoo shop, the time you ran away scared and still seeing his blood on your own hands. You get a single line across your left wrist.

It’s your way of keeping Nathan alive, the part of him that never wanted to hurt anyone. It’s there to show you that you can kill the ugliness inside of yourself but continue to live, too. You have to live and keep on fighting the evil and keep making the hard choices. You have to save people before they become the ones others need saving from. That’s what it’s there to remind you of.

You barely even feel the pain of the needle that time, because the line is so thin. That means you’ll be back soon.

\---

You get one for your mother. It’s from Chaucer’s “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” and it reads, “But al thyng which shyneth as the gold / Nis nat gold, as that I have herd it told.”

This one exists to cage in your past, to reduce it to simple black lettering, to remind you that no matter how much better off it seemed to you that other people were when you were younger nobody made it through their childhood unscathed.

It holds everything you don’t want to remember close enough to touch but not to feel, not really, and it makes you think of the good things. There were so many happy moments, too, and you used to feel guilty all of the time for not thinking those mattered as much as the goalpost and the episodes and the medicine and the empty hook where your father’s keys used to hang.

But now you have this tattoo and the guilt doesn’t weigh so heavily on your chest anymore.

It sits on your ribs, right where a book might rest as you held it to your side- closed, because the one you’d actually be reading would come out of your mother’s lips and dance through the air into your ears.

She’d always read the best ones out loud.

\---

It happens in Florida, the case of the ‘Illustrated Man’. You don’t like the term but it’s your fault for telling everyone about the story. And you feel sick everytime you hear it, every time you look down at the journals in your hand and read the writing and understand this killer, every time you see the truth of his tattoos written across the pages. You panic- you can feel it building inside of you. Heart racing, ears ringing, chest heaving- panic. Because you are so similar. Because- what if you are just like him?

What if you are no better than this man who painted trophies on his chest for all of those he burned to the ground, what if one day you slit your wrist across the fated line just like Nathan and they find you covered with a list of every person you’ve ever failed?

And Morgan sees you, he sees you sitting in the corner with a journal splayed out on the concrete where you dropped it, sees the hands rubbing at your skin through your clothes, sees the flash of terror across your face. He comes to you and reminds you to breathe and calms you down and leads you away to somewhere private.

You’re outside in the heat and he is looking at you with a question in his eyes. So you ask him. It was always going to be him, the one who might understand.

You tilt your head to the right and raise your hand over your shoulder to clutch at your back, to try to hold on to the one image that’s bothering you most of all, and you rest your hand over the fabric of your shirt and ask if you aren’t just the same as him. If it’s wrong, somehow, to print your story out for everyone to see. If that means there’s something wrong inside. And you ask him about his tattoos, about why he got them.

Morgan squints at you and says, kid, is that what this is about? His tattoos? And he stares like he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t, though, so that, at least, stops you from running. He doesn’t see you any differently, not yet.

“It’s just- do you think that makes you like him? Makes you- I was reading his journal. And he- he talks about a lot of things. A lot of normal things.”

“You know, we get into the minds of killers every day, Reid. They’re all normal on the surface. What’s bugging you about this guy?”

You rub over your left shoulder blade one more time before dropping your arm to your side. “It’s- he likes them. The tattoos. He talks about getting them done and it was- Do you think that there’s something wrong with them? That they’re like- like trophies. For everyone? Is it wrong to want to have something like that?”

“Reid, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I have never done anything like that man has done, even with the ink in my skin. There’s nothing wrong with tattoos and you know that. I know that you know that. Where’s this coming from?”

You can’t look him in the eye. He asks you, finally, if you have one, if that’s what this is really about.

“Well, technically, yes I do have one,” you answer. His eyebrows shoot up and he looks startled, like he never expected to be right.

“Technically?”

“I mean, yes, I do have one. I also have, uh, twenty-six more?” It comes out like a question, soft and sliding up in pitch.

He doesn’t really have anything to say to that.

Finally, “What?”

You tell him that he heard you right and then, of course, he wants to see.

So you show him the first one, the one that started this all; you show him your shoulder blade, your freeing wings. It’s a technical drawing of a spacecraft and a stippled shooting star, both drifting across a galaxy. You think it’s beautiful- sprawling and dark and real.

Morgan stands behind you, solid and watching and waiting. So you explain.

You tell him about the night you got it, about Tobias. You tell him about how you thought you were going to die in that cabin and you wondered if anything you’d ever done had made a difference to anybody.

You tell him about actually dying in that shed, about how you wished and wished in those last moments that you’d been different, been somebody better, been that man that you murdered but you could have been if you’d made another choice, long ago.

And you tell him about the Illustrated Man, like you’d mentioned that morning. But this time you talk about “Kaleidoscope.” About this crew on a spaceship that is stranded and lost and helpless and dying. And they know their death is coming and they consider their lives. And one of them realizes that they have done nothing worthwhile, nothing that will matter after this, after his end. But he wishes anyways, he wishes that his life will be worth something to someone else.

And the end comes, and he burns in the atmosphere. And a child sees him. And the child sees a shooting star.

You wait, feel a ghost of heat against your shoulder but you don’t turn, don’t move all. When it disappears without making contact you part your lips again, say, “I thought the same things as he did, when I got them. He said they’d help him remember, and I thought- I thought we might be the same.”

“You’re a good man, Reid.”

“Yeah,” you whisper back, because you can’t force any of your other thoughts out into the open, not when you’re already so vulnerable.

There is nothing but silence behind you. So you pull your shirt back over your shoulders and turn around and almost flinch under the intense gaze. Morgan is looking at you. Just looking. It seems like he can see your soul. You stand there, not sure what to do.

And then the moment is broken- “Twenty-seven, huh?”

You grin. “Twenty-seven.”

You solve the case.

\---

You get one for Sammy- a simple set of hands. Not clock hands- these hands are human, curled delicately with pointer fingers extended. They are graceful and soft and full of movement, but twisted and odd and not quite right and they sit on your hip like they mean something more. They’re arranged so that they form an L of sorts, hinting to a time like the hands of a clock might. These hands point to 3:00.

You heard him- Sammy. You listened and you understood.

It feels like something bigger. But mostly- the thing that really makes you run to Ray's at some ungodly hour of the morning after you get back from the case is that nobody else did. For so long nobody could understand a word he was saying even though he was pushing the facts out of his body until he had no more air left to give. It was like he was screaming into an empty canyon, stuck at the bottom with only the sound of his own echo for company.

\---

Emily dies. They tell you that she never made it off the table and you panic, you hear the words but you reject them. No- it’s- you were just expecting the worst. You’re exhausted, sleep deprived; you’re hallucinating. Obviously.

It is possible for an individual to suffer from visual hallucinations after as little as 72 hours without sleep. Disorientation, paranoid thoughts- of course, a hallucination of this magnitude is highly unlikely, but if you consider the probable latent psychosis you harbor then it is possible. It has to be possible.

But when you raise your head you see everyone's faces. They are devastated. They’ve just heard what you heard and she’s- no. No, no, no. No way that can’t be- and the room starts going fuzzy and dark and grainy- and you can’t move your body, all you can do is give in to the way everything around you is pounding with the beat of your heart- it won’t stop moving. But then you can move and you stand up and a tear falls before you can stop it.

And you patiently take one step forward, look to Morgan, take a breath, whisper, “I need, Morgan- I’m going to go get- okay? I need to go.” So you go, and maybe you hear him call your name, but maybe you don’t.

And he doesn’t chase you so you keep going. And you consider how the whole team is going to think you’re out chasing a high, taking a hit, shooting oblivion into your veins. You know they’ll think that about you- and they’ll think you confided in Morgan, all those years ago- they’ll believe that and you don’t blame them. Because you’re the type, aren’t you? And you’re so weak, it’s what they all think and you can’t argue, and you’re an addict, that is true, you fixate, you’re always too much. So you don’t mind that they’ll be thinking it.

It’s just- you’re not addicted to opiates. You’re addicted to the needles pressing permanence into your skin, the needles holding ink- not dilaudid- that will remember for you so that you can forget.

Maybe Morgan will tell them. Maybe he won’t.

Maybe you’ll walk into the office in the morning and show them the fresh tattoo on the inside of your right elbow. The ‘Прощай’, which means goodbye- in Russian because it is just for her, for the one you never got to say to her.

Maybe you’ll show them the black dot, just below it- small, delicate- sitting there where it just might have been pink, in another world, in a world where you weren’t brave enough for the shooting star and the spaceship and the impenetrable door.

Maybe.


End file.
